Patient Modeling for Simulation Guided Head and Neck Hyperthermia

The prognosis for patients with advanced head and neck (H&N) cancer is very poor and treatment is challenging. These patients are standardly treated with radiotherapy with or without chemotherapy. These treatments are associated with a high treatment related late toxicity that affects the quality of life and social contacts in 20% of the patients. Side effects reported in all studies concern loss of swallowing and salivary function leading to difficulties in speaking and eating. Clinical studies have shown that the addition of a local hyperthermia treatment to a (chemo)radiation treatment signifcantly improve the treatment outcome without increasing treatment related late toxicity. Application of hyperthermia in the challenging H&N region using multi antenna-element applicators requires hyperthermia treatment planning (HTP). This thesis focuses on the development of an accurate and efficient patient model generation for patient-specific HTP based on electromagnetic (EM) and temperature modeling. The first two chapters include the automatic generation of 3D patient-models from Computed Tomography (CT) scans (chapter 2) or CT and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans (chapter 3). Chapter 4 and 5 include temperature simulation guided H&N hyperthermia using optimized thermal tissue property values.